[MPlayer-users] tweaking the MP3

[Rocky Hetherington]

On Sat, 2002-07-06 at 10:28, Florin Andrei wrote:

> > 96kbps should be suitable for action films, but you will most likely
> > notice problems with things like explosions.
> > In most of my encoded files that i share i usually use a 56kbps - 64kbps
> > MP3, which works fine, but most of my files do not contain complicated
> > audio.
> 
> Ok. Can you describe a little bit what were the problems?
> Artifacts? When? What?

Artifacts are there.  Low frequencies are generally lacking, and there's
distortion at the higher frequencies too.  It also depends on how you
listen to the file.

If you haven't spent hundreds on a high end PC speaker system and are
just playing back via PC speakers or headphones you wont notice most of
the problems bar some occasional tininess.  If you've a high end PC
speaker system or are playing back via your hifi you will most likely
hear the problems.

It's different for everybody of course, the only real way to tell is to
encode yourself some samples and see what you regard as suitable quality
for playback.
 
> > Personally i can't wait until Mencoder supports Ogg Vorbis for audio. 
> > Compiled Vorbis from CVS a couple of days ago and the improvements over
> > RC3 are amazing.  A q0 file (nominal bitrate of 64kbps) now sounds as
> > good as a 128kbps MP3.
> 
> That of course sounds cool, but there's the problem of compatibility.
> Other players? Other codecs? Other OSes?

It shouldn't be a problem playing back Vorbis files on other OS', and
there are already Windows tools for creating files with DivX video and
Vorbis audio.

I'm also looking forward to seeing how the new Theora project
(http://www.theora.org) comes along.  It's basically On2's VP3.2 codec
with Ogg Vorbis for audio.  Not as efficient as MPEG4 at the moment, but
i hear it's quite good for the sort of files i usually encode (mostly
anime).

Hopefully it will improve in leaps and bounds and this time next year
i'll be using it for all my encoding needs. ^_^
-- 
Rocky Hetherington
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